Smells like capitalism outside

Let's do some Canadian pipeline-wildfire math. The Canadian Energy Center says growing oil exports by 1.5M barrels/day **could** boost GDP by ~31B annually. Meanwhile, wildfire smoke health costs alone - just the health costs, nothing else - averaged 23B/year, past tense. And they're growing fast.

Another banger from Emily (subscribe to HEATED!) “We are trapped inside, afraid to breathe, because a small, powerful group of polluting industries and their political allies spent decades lying about the problem and are still working, right now, to reverse what little progress has been made.”

Get rid of your imposter syndrome (which tends to afflict smart people more than dumb people anyway). NO ONE is a "real expert." You have every right to be there. And you can make an enormous difference if you're in the room at the right time. Get involved. Participate. You can matter.

Luckily the City of Chicago is so flush with cash that there was no better use for six hundred thirty million dollars

Once upon a time there was light in my life, now there’s only love in the dark 🖤🖤🖤

37.5 GW of behind-the-meter virtual power plant capacity is comparable to all battery capacity in the US today (around 50-60 GW). Both are growing fast. Batteries generally get transferrable federal tax credits of 30-50%, while VPPs are largely unsubsidized.

“He then put her license plate details on a surveillance “hotlist,” meaning he would get a notification in real time anytime she drove by an AI-powered license plate surveillance camera.”

Makes you think.

Good news. This was a pretty bogus challenge, made by some of the scummiest actors in Chicago politics at the moment, called "The Urban Center". A short thread:

Abolish the Supreme Court

I need y'all to understand that I teach high school and there are teenagers already planning to leave the U.S. to because they will be studying science or medicine. They are SO serious about it - saving money, learning extra languages, and looking to see if there are familial connections abroad.

Three months ago, @peoplesfabric.bsky.social independently unraveled (hah) what happened in the minutes leading up to a Border Patrol car crash that traumatized a Chicago community. We want to bring you more reporting like this. On a shoestring budget, it's growing increasingly difficult:

Happy Sunday, Bike-a-palooza is today! Come on by to Welles Park from 5-8pm for lots of biking fun 🎉

also de Blasio froze the rent three times! Mamdani has pushed it up to a two-year freeze, but the main thing here is also that he's very good at *taking credit for doing things.* This is praise, not criticism! It's extremely important for politicians to do this.

“Simply put: Dem Socialists (+17 pt net fav) are more popular than Dems in Congress (+4 pt net fav) with Dems… it’s no wonder they’re winning in primaries across the country… This is one of the biggest political changes I’ve seen in my lifetime.”

I resent the video-fication of podcasting. That's just a TV show. Podcasts aren't supposed to be for hot people. They have everything else

Month one after launch: 27,000 releases uploaded to Subvert 150,000 tracks 3,000 transactions $80,000 in total transations We own it

My neighbor told me Larry the Cat keeps eating his Prime Ministers so I asked how many PMs he has and he said he just goes to the House of Lords and gets a new PM afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding Prime Ministers to Larry the Cat and then his king started crying

Today in the New York Times: "Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century."

2026 is the year I turned Bring My Pillow On Trips years old

Congrats to all the new assistant professors who got STEM jobs at R1 universities! Surprise, one-third of your work is now teaching writing to grad students who mostly avoided humanities and social science classes in undergrad. #AcademicSky

Regulated monopoly utilities tend to behave better when they face a credible threat of some other model visibly outperforming them. The credible threat from public city-run utilities was the main reason the robber barons who ran electricity monopolies agreed to regulation in the first place.

$1 billion in stock payouts for 15 electric utility CEOs, while millions of Americans face utility shutoffs and tens of millions are behind on electric bills. States guaranteeing profit to monopoly utility executives and shareholders, even if it means gouging ratepayers, is outdated and untenable.

Seeing another round of hope vs. despair discourse play out in climate circles, so allow me to once again put a plug in for rage.

I once got so drunk I yelled “Holy shit it’s the 1850s!” And flipped all the breakers during a LAN party. Never got a Nazi tattoo though.

After a Wisconsin town did this, the mayor said: “The fact that they didn’t take the cameras down shows that we are the product. They were never really selling to us in the first place. They're selling to much bigger agencies the ability to spy on a ton of people.” (via boltsmag.org/verona-wisco...)

It turns out when you turn off the unreliable gunshot detection machine, you have less false reports and can go serve actual calls

Greg Kinnear betrayed my trust in him

You're not losing your marbles. Rich people are stealing your money. We broke down how Illinois' tax system benefits the wealthy in this video. It's too long for Bluesky, but you can click the link: www.instagram.com/p/DYZbtb6EV8Q/ TL;DR: It's time to Tax the MF Rich. 💰

As I’ve been knocking doors across the 45th Ward, residents have noted that Gardiner has been even more “absent” than usual. Now we know why: he’s been focused on getting a payout on his way out the door. Follow our campaign for real representation, and find ways to help, at bit.ly/sgdnewsletter

Damn, that fight ended fast

Causal or coincidence that this lines up with when the world fully fell into the Darkest Timeline?

Everyone talks about Joe Rogan, what we really need is a Weird Al of the left @miguelfor40.bsky.social

the Dem tendency to malign academics as a cheap and lazy populist gesture, at a moment when Republicans are destroying academia while deploying cheap and lazy populist rhetoric, and while the main discernible Dem promise is not being Republicans, is neither great messaging nor great substance

in the century+ since debs said this, all that has changed is “millions” on both occurrences could be replaced by “billions”

Hello World, we’d like to introduce ourselves. We the workers of the Magic: The Gathering Arena team have come together to unionize as United Wizards of the Coast - CWA! 🧵 unitedwizardsofthecoast.com/news/announcing-united-wizards-coast-cwa

Love to see two of my major interests cross over

A reminder of where we stand. Source: ed-hawkins.github.io/climate-visu...

post of the year

Honest to god if you do not live in Chicago you are missing out and I feel bad for you

Pathetic that JB caved & wants to drain tax revenues for sports owned by a super-rich family As the S-T points out this gives "tax breaks to a franchise valued at nearly $9 billion while homeowners statewide struggle to keep up with their property tax bills." chicago.suntimes.com/bears-stadiu...

Switching to Heat Pump Water Heaters Could Save $8 Billion Annually in Health Care Costs cleantechnica.com/2026/04/20/s...

On Saturday afternoon at the United Working Families convention, I was able to facilitate a conversation about progressive revenue and the fight to Tax the MF Rich.